Tag: #fail

I was asked if I could create a page on the intranet that had navigation something like this:

This is the Firefox rendered version, I don’t have the original Word document. The requested design had top right corners clipped, but Sharepoint messes with CSS. I created it with HTML/CSS as a list, so that it would degrade nicely. I just sat there, design on one display editing on the other. After a while you understand the language. You know what to alter in the code to make it look right. A few iterations and I was happy with it, so I published it.

Now, I’m lucky enough to be allowed to use Firefox in the office. Everyone else uses Internet Explorer. I have IE8 installed on my machine. I didn’t test it in IE (yeah, I know!) I just assumed that it would look ok.

I rang the requester. They weren’t happy with the result:

Well, I can see why! So I checked it in Chrome:

Chrome and Firefox agree on what it should look like.

And this is why I hate Internet Explorer! It takes my thoughts, my translation of them into HTML/CSS, and completely mangles them! It’s not the first time I’ve seen this either. Previously I have had minutes render as I invisaged in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome but fail in IE.

I recently got a Nokia 5800 and, in a moment of boredom, decided to try out the Nokia Music store. The phone, after all, is tagged XpressMusic so I thought the process would be easy.

Creating an account was straight forward, I logged in and selected a track and paid for it. I actually paid £8 for eight tracks. I set it downloading and carried on my journey home.

Now coverage around us is not brilliant and by the time I got home the track still seemed to be downloading. I left it for some time but it seemed to make no progress. Eventually I stopped it and connected via our wireless LAN at home – that would be quicker.

No it wasn’t. The phone then complained that it was out of memory and I should close other applications. I didn’t have any other applications running. I checked the internal memory and had around 70Mb available. A quick Google revealed this to be a common problem.

No matter I thought, I’ll get it on my PC and USB it to the phone.

This wasn’t easy either. Nokia Music store front page is all Flash and only displayed a blank page on my old Fedora 6 machine. On my Fedora 10 laptop I got a page telling me that my operating system isn’t supported.

Not a terribly streamlined, Xpress experience.

But it gets worse. This morning I wanted to play the start of the track so that my daughter could identify it. It started playing fine but then popped up a modal dialog box saying that it was checking the licence. Because the dialog was modal I then couldn’t stop it from playing or quit the music player. In the end I turned the phone off.

I’ve deleted the track now, I’ll get stuff from Amazon in future.
KTHXBAI Nokia Music Store